The Mayor of Somalia’s capital has warned of hundreds of deaths that he suspects have been caused by the new coronavirus, suggesting that actual death toll may be 10 times higher than official figures.

In an address at the beginning of May to the Somali COVID-19 Task Force, Mogadishu Mayor Omar Mohamud Mohamed said that “the highest deaths we recorded in a single day was 49 people and the lowest was 22, and this is just between the 19th of April and the beginning of May.”

Given the higher-than-usual death rates for Mogadishu, he said that he calculates that the death toll among COVID-19 infected patients in the capital could be “almost 500 people”.

According to Johns Hopkins University figures, Somalia has 1,219 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 52 deaths.

There also just aren’t a lot of hospitals, even in Mogadishu, to take care of COVID-19 patients.